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Making it Rain: Solar-Powered Irrigation and the ‘Household Productivity Ladder’
Solar energy can be put to many constructive uses in emerging market households, but SunCulture focuses on helping smallholder farmers move water. Why? Because it has the greatest impact on a key area: household productivity. Their CEO Samir Ibrahim shares the story of a SunCulture customer, whose experiences highlight the value of solar-powered irrigation to 2.5 billion farmers living on less than $2 a day.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Spiders, Butterfly Wings Inspire New Solutions for Urban Ag, Renewables
An international team based in New York City has developed a prototype product that mimics the way living systems capture, store and distribute water, which could be deployed to help meet growing demand for sustainable, local food production. Designed by NexLoop, the prototype has been awarded the $100,000 Ray C. Anderson Foundation Ray of Hope Prize in the 2017 Biomimicry Global Design Challenge, an international design competition and accelerator program that crowdsources nature-inspired climate change solutions for issues such as food systems, water management and alternative energy.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Technology
- Tags
- renewable energy
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Helping Farmers Rebuild After Civil War Isn’t Charity; It’s Good Business
As an agribusiness owner in Africa, GADC founder Bruce Robertson has grown weary of the silver bullet solutions proposed for transforming rural economies. In 22 years in Uganda, he has yet to see a quick fix. But private enterprise has enormous potential to improve rural lives when donors and businesses collaborate, he says, explaining GADC's "replicable model with huge potential for expansion."
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Impact investors flock to sustainable agriculture
"There's total momentum right now around people rethinking about how their money is being put to work," said Kate Danaher, senior manager of social enterprise lending and integrated capital at RSF Social Finance. "Impact investing as a whole is growing very quickly, and my guess is that if you polled everyone interested, the most popular sector is sustainable food and ag." In fact, according to the Global Impact Investing Network's most recent survey (PDF), 63 percent of impact investors said they were putting their dollars into food and agriculture, and impact investment in the sector has grown at an annual rate of 32.5 percent since 2013.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
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Bringing social change to the dinner table, one rice bowl at a time
“I wouldn’t say I intended to venture into social entrepreneurship, but I’ve always wanted to make a difference. It took me about 15 years to really start this (Siam Organic) and prior to that, I was thinking about tackling the various problems faced by the world,” Neil tells The Edge.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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UN Environment launches $1 billion fund for sustainable farming
According to UN Environment, halting climate change along with an increasing agricultural footprint while ensuring growth in agricultural production to feed an estimated 9 billion people by 2050 will be among the biggest challenges of the 21st century.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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Only modernized commercial farms will fill Africa’s plate, economists warn
A transformation from small-scale subsistence farms to mechanised, more commercially viable farms is essential, said experts at the Ghana-based African Centre for Economic Transformation, who outlined a bold plan to revolutionise agriculture and fuel economic growth in a report launched Tuesday at an African finance ministers meeting at the World Bank and backed by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Sustainable irrigation may harm other development goals, study shows
Over-extraction of groundwater for crop irrigation is one of the main causes of groundwater depletion in regions including Mexico, North East China, northern Africa, the Middle East, and the Midwest, south and west US.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
- Tags
- SDGs
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